His biographers say that Frank Lloyd Wright didn’t particularly care for NYC (or the East Coast for that matter), and he produced only one major work in the five boroughs: the spiraling Guggenheim Museum on 5th Avenue and East 88th Street. Another Wright-designed ranch house was constructed from prefabricated materials in Lighthouse Hill, Staten Island; both works were completed after the great architect’s death in 1959.
Though Wright’s houses can be found mainly in the Midwest and West, there is a Wright-designed home “around the corner” in Great Neck Estates, on Magnolia and Myrtle Drives just east of NYC. It’s a small, seven-room house built in 1937-1938 for Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Rebhuhn, a magazine publisher and dress designer, respectively. It was designed with a hole in the ceiling around an already-existing oak tree, but the tree died from excessive heat in the house shortly after, and the hole was filled in. The story goes that Ben Rebhuhn read an article in Coronet magazine about Wright, wrote the architect and asked him to design a house for him, and Wright assented. It was pretty easy in those days.
Source: Frank Lloyd Wright, Recollections by Those Who Knew Him, Edgar Tafel, Dover 1993
Also: Frank Lloyd Wright in New York: The Plaza Years 1954-1959, Jane King Hession, Gibbs Smith 2007
12/24/13